- sollewittOn the island of Ireland those people _are_ the overbearing Brits.
- The N900 was my peak “mobile computing is awesome” device.
I went to see District 9 in the cinema in Helsinki. Uh oh, the alien parts are only subtitled in Finnish and Swedish and my Finnish is not up to that.
I installed a BitTorrent client, found the release on Pirate Bay, successfully torrented just the subtitle file, and used an editor to read the subtitles for scenes with a lot of alien.
The N9 had much better UI, but there was something of the cyberpunk “deck” idea in that thing, it was great.
- I'd guess every soda gun at every bar in the world would work the same?
- > The commercial citizen, his goal is to make money, compete and to do so by bending the rules and using any means possible.
This conception of "citizen" is even more depressing to me than Homo Economicus. There are values aside from wealth, and not everyone is a money grubbing sociopath.
- It's not that it's hard, it's that it's stupid - it's based on a misunderstanding of the physics involved which completely negates any of the benefits.
It's the opposite of engineering, where you understand a problem space and then try to determine the optimal solution given the constraints. This starts with an assumption that the solution is correct, and then tries to engineer fixes to gaps in the solution, without ever reevaluating the solution choice.
- Caffeine is a weak base, the acidity in coffee is from other compounds in the bean. (Tasty, tasty compounds)
- Really easy, I've just forgotten again.
- I chose to read this as a really good satire on the Dunning-Kruger effect.
- AI industry: please _please_ get it together with naming. There shouldn’t be this much overlap between this, a dataset, and a massive image model which was already given a garbage name to begin with.
Don’t get me started in how “agent” is a term of art that means absolutely nothing, encompassing everything from a plain old shell script to a full language model.
- Data centers.
- “You may not know about the issue but I bet you reckon something, so why not tell us what you reckon. Let us enjoy the full majesty of your uninformed ad-hoc reckon” - David Mitchell.
- Pebble-bed reactors are incapable of catastrophic failure, and molten-salt reactors have negative feedback loops with increasing pressure. Nuclear doesn't have to mean the same designs that were used in the 60s.
- I buy Gary Stevenson’s diagnosis that the root cause of the rising cost of everything is increasing inequality and industry capture by the wealthy.
There are two sides to this. The first is, hospitals are owned by investors, and have to increase profits. The typical playbook of trying to acquire at least a local monopoly to price-fix is in play everywhere.
The other side is: to achieve high profit margins chase wealthy customers and cater to their preferences. Headhunt star staff with increased salaries. Build shiny new hospitals and prioritize private rooms (HIPAA provided a great excuse here). To woo investors turn administrator into a CEO position with commensurate pay.
None of this incentivizes providing quality health care to non-wealthy people at a fair price. It incentivizes trying to get rid of lower income patients as quickly as possible to make room for high income or well insured patients who can be billed more.
Same as housing, this issue is everywhere in the western world. We can try to tackle it by itself (transparent pricing would probably help a great deal), but the root issue is bigger: the rich are getting what they want on both sides of the equation. They don’t want affordable healthcare.
- It captures not understanding what you’re doing crossed with limited AI understanding which means the whole thing is running on vibes.
- There’s that study that found Italian families who were wealthy during the renaissance are still wealthy.
Sweden had a very powerful monarchy (the dominant Baltic power at one point) and an aristocracy but never a revolution. I’d expect a lot of wealth inequality based on inherited wealth.
- Good thing we're not doing anything silly like heating the entire planet. That would be a very alarming finding if we were.
- I think _not_ having Elon Musk is worth a couple of hundred billion in 2025, the guy has become a random liability generator.
- > Nothing in this is really difficult.
Providing drivers for all the hardware and peripherals that all work together in all the permutations is properly hard. I’d argue it’s the root issue.
Google can test each ChromeOS release against their Chromebooks to make sure everything works. If something fails, someone in Google can root cause on a matching hardware configuration easily.
This is not feasible for a general desktop Linux distribution because there are too many permutations. If the distribution is targeted at non-technical users the matter of root causing an issue on a hardware configuration the maintenance team can’t replicate becomes intractable.
A solution might be to literally only support Google Chromebooks, to constrain the possibility space, but even that is a big undertaking if the goal is to match ChromeOS for quality.
- I worked on a project exploring this idea and an issue is that while each step in a user journey (get restaurants near me, show me menus, make an order, show me on a map) could invoke a distinct service, provided by different providers that just do that thing well, they all want ownership of the experience and the precious user data and prefer to consume input and render output rather provide output data for others to use - there’s no stdout to pipe. The upshot is apps do everything, which is the opposite of the Unix philosophy.